On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 00:00 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote: > I had an IRC discussion with a nice fellow from Jakarta a number of > months back, who explained how expensive it was to be on the internet. > He had a 56k connection, which cost him the equivalent of $20 USD for > the month. > > My first thought was probably quite similar to what many of you are > currently thinking: "Um, well that's very close to what it costs in > the US for access too, so is not really more expensive." > > Except for the fact that this person was a full time computer > programmer, and told me that his monthly salary was the equivalent > of $200 US dollars. Think about that. His monthly internet connection > cost him 1/10th of his entire income for the month, just to get a > crappy 56k connection which ties up the phoneline as long as it is > connected. I don't know if there were per-minute telephone fees > on top of that or not. > > For each employed person reading this, take 1/10th of your income. > Would you pay that much money to have a 56k phone line based internet > connection each month? Even if you did do so, would you want to > download the entire DVD ISO image which takes anywhere from 2-3 weeks > to download? All this through a phone line which gets very frequently > disconnected? Its roughly the same amount of data to download a DVD vs 5 CDs. I fail to see how the "bandwidth is expensive" argument applies. Download cost is meaningless in the CDs vs DVDs argument. Its the same. The question is, what does one do with the images once downloaded. > I told him perhaps he should just purchase Fedora Core on CD instead, > and indicated there were many places online which you could order CDs. > He said it would be about $10, which again is like 5% of his monthly > income. And that's a twice a year cost. He said that buying Fedora > CDs locally was more expensive for "free software" than buying bootleg > copies of Windows XP down the street for $2-5 a pop. This is all a great example of what even a poor broke college student like me takes for granted in the US, and is completely missing the really useful bits of information: 1) So how *does* this person get Fedora, and keep it updated? Do they download it at 56k? Do they buy CDs? What? 2) Do they have a DVD reader?
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